More Americans Shoot Each Other Dead
by expatbrian
It's getting hard to keep up with it. Before I can even finish reading the latest update on the 5 women who were shot dead in Tinley Park (and one wounded) the news hits of a 15 year old boy who shot dead his parents and his 13 and 11 year old brothers.
Did he do it with an illegal handgun? Was he an armed criminal? No. He used his father's very legal handgun and wiped out his entire family.
What would have happened if he didn't have access to that gun? Would he have used a different weapon, perhaps a knife? Would he have clubbed them to death? Would he have searched for another gun somewhere? Would the family have lived a little while longer or had a better chance of surviving if any of those were the case?
We don't know the answer to that but there is no doubt that the easy access to his dad's handgun made the killing easier than any of those other possibilities. And in his teenaged rage, he didn't have to take the time to search for another method....and maybe cool down a little.
I'm sure that the dad had the handgun for protection. To keep himself and his family safe. Fat fucking lot of good it did him. He's dead, his family is dead and his one surviving son will go away for life. So much for safety.
Locking your doors and windows, arming the alarms and unleashing the doberman might protect you from the criminals outside. But if you want to be safe from your pissed off kids you better lock up your guns.
cross posted from World Gone Mad
It's getting hard to keep up with it. Before I can even finish reading the latest update on the 5 women who were shot dead in Tinley Park (and one wounded) the news hits of a 15 year old boy who shot dead his parents and his 13 and 11 year old brothers.Did he do it with an illegal handgun? Was he an armed criminal? No. He used his father's very legal handgun and wiped out his entire family.
The teen had not been getting along with his father, police said. On Friday night, he went into the house after other family members had gone to sleep and shot each of them. His father's handgun had been in the house, police said.
What would have happened if he didn't have access to that gun? Would he have used a different weapon, perhaps a knife? Would he have clubbed them to death? Would he have searched for another gun somewhere? Would the family have lived a little while longer or had a better chance of surviving if any of those were the case?
We don't know the answer to that but there is no doubt that the easy access to his dad's handgun made the killing easier than any of those other possibilities. And in his teenaged rage, he didn't have to take the time to search for another method....and maybe cool down a little.
I'm sure that the dad had the handgun for protection. To keep himself and his family safe. Fat fucking lot of good it did him. He's dead, his family is dead and his one surviving son will go away for life. So much for safety.
Locking your doors and windows, arming the alarms and unleashing the doberman might protect you from the criminals outside. But if you want to be safe from your pissed off kids you better lock up your guns.
cross posted from World Gone Mad
posted by Libby Spencer at 3:52 AM
5 Comments:
"you better lock up your guns."
Yep, and in many cases it's illegal not to do that. The guy committed a felony by allowing his son access. Small consolation.
Good idea to hide the car keys too and lock up the liquor. Kids will be kids - like the gang of a dozen or so who broke into a woman's house last year near Palm Beach and raped her in front of her kids, one by one, hour after hour. She had no way of protecting herself, nor did that pro football player murdered in Florida by home invaders a few months ago.
Florida has a very high rate of home invasions, but all in all, gun related crime has been decreasing since the early 1970's - dramatically in places like Miami - and it accounts for a fraction of a percent of violent deaths at best - a large proportion of which are gang and drug related.
Yesterday afternoon, while cruising home from Boca Raton at a comfortable 110, I was honked at and given the finger by some guys in a Chrysler minivan because I couldn't get out of his way fast enough. Right behind him and trying to pass him was a huge pickup truck pulling a trailer full of ATV's. Needless to say, although somebody dies on that stretch of road every week, the resident New Yorkers are terrified of guns even though the likelihood of dying by gunfire is almost meaningless statistically.
For what it's worth, the group with the highest percentage of Americans who die by gunshot are the elderly and suicide plays a large role in the number of shootings.
In 2000, the number of adults murdered by juveniles was 256. That's a tiny percentage and not all of it was by firearms and practically none of it bore any resemblance to that Chicago shooting.
The total number of gun deaths is around 30,000 per year in a nation of 304,000,000 - isn't that something less than .3 percent of the population and since those shootings are largely confined to a number of sub groups with criminal lifestyles, the typical citizen will probably never even know someone who knows someone who was shot. I don't and I'm as old as dirt.
The bottom line, in my opinion, would be that making sure my tires are in good condition will return a n enormous increase in safety versus a statistically tiny amount gained by getting rid of my little target pistol which lives in a locked safe in a house with no kids and travels in a locked trunk to the gun club a few times a year.
And then, there's the problem of how you get rid of hundreds of millions of guns in a non-police state where the constitution guarantees the right to own them.
First, I've owned guns all my life, raised four sons and never had a child try to shoot me. The boys were raised around guns and understood that once you shoot some person or creature, there's no taking it back. We used melons and squash as targets for the visual effect. Watching red watermelon flying all over gave them a good picture of what would happen to a head or heart. Our guns were locked up except for a handgun and shot gun which were placed in our bedroom each evening and relocked each morning.
More to the point here is what happened to this kid in his house that would lead him to commit such an act of incomprehensible violence? Children can be trying, especially in their teen years, but if you love your children, you listen to them and try to work things out. More gun control? Take my guns and all that's left is the criminals with the unregistered ones. Gee, you don't think home invasions and car jackings won't go up then? You can turn your pop gun in if you want to, but I'm keeping mine.
I appreciate your comments and will respond in a followup post.
If you haven't already, please refer to the 2006 FBI crime stats on their webpage. Murder and robbery are both up in 2005 and 2006 and if you refer to the tables (19, 20, 21 I believe) you will see that the vast majority of murder, robbery and aggravated assault involve guns, mostly handguns. In 2006, of the 17,000+ murders, over 10,000 were by guns. This was not due to juvenile gangs. There were 865 juvenile gang killings in that time, 800 of which involved guns.
No, murder is largely an adult crime and the weapon of choice is the firearm.
if those in the flyover states want to turn their communities into meth addled warzones I say fine by me.
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